The reporter inexplicably put down his camera.
“Let’s go,” Lu Sihan said. “Don’t disturb her.”
The van started up and slowly drove out of the alley.
But Lu Sihan knew this was only the first one.
Soon there would be a second, a third, a tenth.
He couldn’t chase them away one by one; he needed to think of a more long-term solution.
He turned around and looked up at the sixth-floor window.
The curtain moved slightly.
She was watching.
Lu Sihan stood in the alley, head tilted upward.
Sunlight fell on his face, illuminating the dark stubble that had sprouted along his jawline overnight.
Suddenly, he raised his hand toward that window and made a gesture.
Morse code.
Using five fingers, it meant: Don’t be afraid.
The curtain remained still for a moment.
Then, slowly, a very small hand emerged from the edge of the curtain and gave a thumbs-up.
It was Xiao Niangao.
Lu Sihan smiled.
Then the curtain was abruptly pulled open.
Shen Luning stood by the window, holding her phone. On the screen was a text message she had just received—not from Lu Sihan.
It was from Jiang Wan.
“Lu Ning sister, it’s been five years, and you’re still so good at hiding. But this time, you won’t run away again, will you? You must come to Si Han and my wedding.”
Shen Luning stared at the message.
Wedding?
Lu Sihan and Jiang Wan?
She flipped her phone over and placed it face-down on the windowsill, her fingers trembling.
She thought she didn’t care anymore. She thought she had uprooted this person from her life and burned them to ashes.
She thought she felt nothing when she saw him kneeling at the door.
But now, seeing the word “wedding,” her heart still skipped a beat.
Not a flutter of excitement.
But the kind of pain that comes from being stepped on.
“Mom,” Xiao Niangao tugged at her sleeve. “What’s wrong?”
Shen Luning crouched down and showed him the phone screen.
“Xiao Niangao, look at this person. Do you know her?”
Xiao Niangao looked down at Jiang Wan’s photo on the screen.
Young, beautiful, with flawless makeup and a perfectly poised smile.
He furrowed his brow—a gesture exactly like Lu Sihan’s.
“I don’t know her,” he said. “But Mom, you’re angry.”
“I’m not.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
Shen Luning looked down at her hands.
They were indeed trembling. She clasped them together, fingers interlocked, and squeezed tightly.
“Xiao Niangao, Mom wants to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“If… just if, Dad were to marry someone else, what would you think?”
Xiao Niangao tilted his head and thought seriously for a moment.
“Mom, Dad won’t marry anyone else.”
“How do you know?”
“Because last night he said he has a sickness, and the sickness is called Shen Luning,” Xiao Niangao said earnestly. “People with sickness don’t marry others; they only marry the person who can cure them.”
Shen Luning looked at him, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
Who on earth taught this child to talk like that?
“Mom,” Xiao Niangao continued, “if you’re worried, why don’t you just ask him directly?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“Mom,” Xiao Niangao sighed, “you’re always like this. You don’t say what you want to say, you don’t vent your anger, you hold it all in until you turn into a little frog, and then you sigh at me.”
Shen Luning couldn’t help but laugh, exasperated.
“When did I ever hold it in until I turned into a little frog?”
“You are right now.”
Xiao Niangao poked her puffed-up cheek. “Look, all puffed up, just like a frog.”
Shen Luning took a deep breath and let it out.
Alright, she really was.
She picked up her phone, reopened that text message, and stared at the two words: “wedding.”
Then she did something she hadn’t expected herself—she didn’t delete the message, didn’t block Jiang Wan, didn’t flip her phone over pretending she hadn’t seen anything.
She opened the chat with Lu Sihan.
The chat she had deleted five years ago.
No chat history, no nickname, just a plain profile picture and the line: “You have added Lu Sihan. You can start chatting now.”
Her fingers hovered above the keyboard.
She typed a few words, deleted them, typed again, deleted again, over and over, growing more and more restless.
In the end, she didn’t send anything, but she didn’t close the chat either.
She just stared at that blank chat interface, at the WeChat account she hadn’t deleted in five years.
Only a tiny, tiny voice deep inside her said: Maybe, you can listen to him one more time.
Downstairs, Lu Sihan’s phone suddenly vibrated.
Thinking it was a message from Shen Luning, he practically snatched it out of his pocket.
But it wasn’t.
It was the WeChat notification: “The other party is typing…”
The prompt flashed, flashed again, and then disappeared.
Someone was talking to him, but nothing came through.
Lu Sihan stared at the prompt, his heart beating fast.
He recognized this WeChat account.
A landscape profile picture—a sea, the sky gray-blue, the water deep black.
The name “Shen Luning” lay there.
She had taken him out of her blacklist.
He didn’t know when—maybe just now, maybe last night when he knelt at the door, maybe the moment she canceled her flight.
He didn’t know.
But what he did know was that she was looking at his chat.
Hesitating whether to say something.
Doing what she had refused to do for five years—talking to him.
Lu Sihan held his phone, standing in the alley, under everyone’s gaze, and did something that completely shattered his image.
He smiled at his phone screen.
A smile so wide it almost reached his ears, his eyes curved like crescent moons, as bright and foolish as the smile of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy seeing the girl he likes walk down the hallway.
The driver saw this from inside the car, opened his mouth, but ultimately said nothing, quietly averting his gaze.
Having followed President Lu for eight years, he had seen his coldness at the negotiation table, his dominance at shareholder meetings, his elegance at charity galas.
He had never seen him smile like this.
Like a large dog whose head had just been patted by its owner.
Lu Sihan finished smiling and started typing.
He didn’t send a message.
He sent a sticker.
Not one of WeChat’s built-in stickers, but one he had saved himself.
A hand-drawn chibi rabbit with one ear tilted, eyes uneven in size, holding a heart in its arms. On the heart, a line of tiny text read: “I’ll wait for you, no matter how long.”
He had drawn it on his phone at the convenience store last night.
He spent an hour on it, drawing and deleting, deleting and drawing, until he ended up with a rabbit so ugly it made him want to cry.
Exactly like the one Shen Luning had sewn.
The message was sent.
The other party fell silent.
Lu Sihan gripped her phone, her palms sweating.
Thirty seconds, one minute, two minutes…
No “typing…” appeared above the message box.
She just stared at that ugly rabbit over and over again, replying with nothing.
But she didn’t delete it either—the chat window remained open.